Since I’m down to blogging just once a year, I usually take 9/11 just to re-post my original thoughts on “remembrance day”.

I’ve had new thoughts since then mostly because of a move down to the Bible belt (after living in Manhattan during and since 9/11) and the friends I’ve made here.

One of the friend that needs here is the patriarch of a very christian family and pastor of a Lutheran church. because I was making friends come out of the septic of politics was purposely avoided. But I knew that they were a very military family and this fact disturbed me.

thanks to a conversation with my wife I can fast forward through the normal debate. Christianity means love, and the loving push is the path of peace…not war, but we also have a responsibility to take care of our brothers and sisters in this world.

This princess to “just war theory” that was taught in our religion class in my Catholic High School. In short it says that as a last resort, war can be considered just and should be entered into if it saves a number of lives greater than the number of lives likely to be lost in its fighting.

the classic example of this is dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Everyone knows and admits that a tremendous number of civilians died in our action against Japan. But it is also decided that without dropping the bomb the war would go on possibly for years and cause more deaths and suffering than would have been carried out had the war not ended quickly.

with this bit of math, it seems that possibly we should have even dropped the bombs earlier. Perhaps we should have targeted a German city and ended the Holocaust much earlier by intervening sooner in the war.

how great would it have been especially from a Christian point of you to save millions of Jews by dropping a single bomb. God would surely have loved this act of heroism.

except of course the fact that war goes against everything that Jesus ever said or stirred for according to the New Testament.

but surely it also goes against christian values to allow suffering to continue and grow.

so it’s true we do have a responsibility to protect our brothers and sisters in this world and also try to leave yet and and suffering whenever we can.

but this does not mean that we are allowed to stop being Christians to do this.

Christianity is not something you can take a vacation from even if it means you can save the lives of millions of people alleviate the sufferings of the many.

so no, you cannot commit murder to save another life you cannot even commit murder to save 10 lives or hundred or thousand…

and yes this sucks

it sucks as a Christian to watch suffering and not be able to take the easy road to fix it.

being a Christian is hard. No one ever said it was easy.

so when faced with death and suffering you must approach these things as a Christian and not as someone who does not value the lives of every person that God has created.

the best-case scenario of this is refusing easy path and embracing war as a solution, is it forces us to be more creative problem solving in find truly christian solutions in encountering pain and suffering.

the worst case scenario is that we will not be able to solve pain and suffering in this world north depot to do anything about its growth.

to make you feel better about the worst case in area, reflect on the life of jesus christ.

Jesus Christ actually did not do much good in the world while he lived. He healed a good number of people, but only those that he happened to come in contact with. he never really sought out to solve any amount of sickness or suffering in any widespread solution although he surely could have wiped out leprosy anytime if you wanted to.

wars and battles were fought in his lifetime, and he didn’t do anything to stop them from happening. in fact how many people did he actually protect from being persecuted? The woman that was about to be stoned? maybe one or two others that I can’t think of off the top of my head. jesus did not do that much to stop persecution in his lifetime.

Christians may be offended at this point, but there with me. Jesus didn’t do that much to stop persecution suffering for war in his lifetime.

what he did to you and what is so amazing about him is that he took the long view. the life of Jesus Christ had an amazing wake in which persecution was lessened, suffering was relieved and the world slowly became better place in the decades, centuries, and millennia that followed.

Jesus easily could use his power to crush the despots of his time and killed the persecutors of the week, but he could not stop being Jesus to do so.

in the same way christian Americans can push to use our weapons to kill those using weapons of mass destruction, push back against the terrace that push us first, and yes kill a small amount of people to end war and save a life of a greater amount of people. But we can not stop being Christian to do so.

I agree. I do think that the concept of the “lesser of two evils” is a good concept worthy of discussion, because some times you do need to make the tough choice. The “just war” is a terrible name for it though…perhaps “justified war” to make a subtle semantic improvement.